Zxian

Stickied and Title changed. Keep 'em coming folks.

Ack... why should he enable all of them? That's a horrid idea... @jasonken - Did you disable any services? Install any new programs? What happened before you noticed this change?

Don't confuse low voltage rails with overpowering the PSU. It could just be a bad PSU (which is my guess). In all honesty, most computers have FAR overspecified power supplies nowadays. Don't believe me? - see for yourself.

@jcarle - Yes, you're right about your usage habits, but most people don't encode videos most of the time or do other CPU intensive tasks all the time. My point was just to say that Intel systems have a narrower "power-band" if you will than AMD systems do. Unfortunately, most corporate networks aren't setup properly, so all those machines just sit there idle while people aren't at work. A proper setup would take advantage of WOL in order to wake the machines and apply updates and do maintenance, but many administrators are lazy, letting the computers just run overnight (thereby letting them do the updates). In that kind of scenario (which is fairly common), the AMD wins on the basis of power consumption.

Dexter pretty much sums it up for me. In the end, VMware Workstation is what I use.

I'd go with CutePDF for creating PDFs. It's the best all-around PDF creator I've been able to find that's simple, lightweight, and creates relatively small PDF files.

This is a well known problem with Microsoft Update having to parse certain XML files. Disable Microsoft Update and the problem should be gone. Microsoft KB - The Automatic Updates service may stop responding

/me agrees with cluberti. I think the main point of this subject is that you can use Windows without additional security software. Whether or not you choose to is a question of comfort level.

Correction - Intel processors typically use less power at full load. At idle, AMD still wins for most matched setups. There are a number of articles on SPCR that relate to this (since they care about low power and all that).

I also wouldn't do this from DOS... I'd get my hands on a live CD, such as WinPE or WinBuider and partition it from there.

What browser are you talking about here? If it's IE, are you running IE7? Upgrading from IE6 to IE7 actually ironed out some bugs my friends had on their computers. Is it just the browser that loads slowly, or other programs as well? If it's other programs, then it's not just the browser.

I would also go with the route of calling Microsoft. You can provide them with the PID of the current installation, and the key provided with the computer (usually on a sticker on the case somewhere), and they'll be able to sort it out for you.

Have you found the files that are responsible for the drivers? If so, you can boot off WinPE (or the like - BartPE, WinBuilder, etc) and then rename the files. If the computer starts up afterwords with the renamed files, then you should be able to delete them. If the computer doesn't boot for some reason, go back to your liveCD and rename the files back to their originals.

I wrote it for myself. It's pretty simple, but I need to expand it to support GIF, PNG and some other image formats.

@albator - You don't need to disable services in order to gain the security. Like jcarle has said several times, keeping your system up to date is all that's needed to keep it secure on the net.

I've never liked editing PDFs. I've always viewed PDFs as "the ISO of a document" if you will. When you want to edit it, you edit the original and create a new one. CutePDF - PDF creator Foxit PDF Reader - PDF Viewer

Windows-Mac file sharing can be finicky... I'd suggest either using an external USB hard drive or burning to disk. I'm not sure if your computers support USB 2.0, but if they don't, then go for the disks. They're cheap and probably your fastest solution.

So... my friends and I were playing some Cribbage today, and we got to thinking about what the possibilities would be if we had an obscene amount of cards... obviously, you'd want to have a program count everything for you, so here's the start of that dream. It's a simple program that takes a 4 card hand, plus the common card and calculates the points for you. As of now, it won't check for things like 5 of a kind...but that's what the future holds in store. We sometimes play "Crazy Crib" where you use two decks, and have 6 cards in hand instead of 4. Just for fun, we tried counting a 15 card hand today...ended up with 688 points... Requires .NET 2.0 - Don't like it - don't use it. It's as simple as that. I don't want to hear about anything anti-NET. We've all had enough of that around here. Download Crib Counter Download .NET 2.0 Framework It also doesn't count flushes. Those become increasingly rare with larger hands, so I decided to not do it. Let me know if you find any bugs... or somehow make it calculate 19 points... Enjoy!

@RyanVM - Google sends me money to my bank account every month. To answer the original question, if you get enough traffic, then yes, the Google Ads can help pay for your site. However, I get about 40,000 page views per month for my blog, and the revenue I get from the Google Ads on the site don't cover my hosting costs entirely. They do help though...

One 19" monitor, one desktop system, one server system, and one laptop. The server is only accessed through Remote Desktop... so that might count as a virtual desktop.

Another vote for Comodo.

Too gimmicky... Get the ZM-MFC1. Much simpler, and it does the job just as well.

The trailers? Yes - they both have sound. The one I converted is just much higher video quality.

W00t w00t... Booyah... yea baby. As you can tell, I'm excited about this coming out. I even converted the trailer I have to flash and posted it on my blog. It looks soooooo cool. As a side note, that video was converted locally, while this one was converted by DreamHost. Notice a difference?

@Idontwantspam - If you need to use unsecured wireless, at least VPN to a free service like SecureIX.com. That way all your traffic will be routed through the VPN connection, and nobody will be able to sniff out the data that you're sending.